Tuesday, January 17, 2006

What Not To Code.

There's a show from the UK called "What Not To Wear." Two somewhat bizare ladies (called Trinny and Susannah) discuss the how to torture others with their schitzoid fashonista expertise (and I mean that as a compliment).

They came to mind as I was writing a bunch of code to do mass database population for an enourmous Oracle-to-Oracle database migration that has some rather perculiar twists. (see previous entries on how to blow entire SAN storage boxes out of the water). I thought of the ladies of couture because I had just written (edited for funniness)

try { // some stuff to do with date logic and manipulation } catch (Exception badDateJuju) { // some boring error handling, roughly equivalent to "run for the hills" }

It wasn't until I was checking for unhandled exceptions that I rememebered the name I'd used. "badDateJuju" ... at once both perfectly descriptive, but also totally cryptic. Certainly better than a bunch of code I've seen that uses "e" *everywhere* ... but it led me to think that some coding practice just shouldn't be allowed.

There needs to be a show ... hell, we'll make it a podcast, or video podcast, called "What Not To Code". Throw in a few geeks, poke fun at broken code (like that's hard), and give out the occassional "I Stole Bill Gates' Altair Basic and Therefore Am Responsible for Microsoft's Existence" award, and voila! We have a show! (OK, the pilot will tank, and it'll never be seen on free-to-air, but humour me here.)